Nobody would deny that there are legitimate concerns to be stated about oilsands development — its pace, scope and regulatory framework. And there are engaged and intelligent critics of the oilsands.

Thomas Homer-Dixon is not one of them.

Homer-Dixon teaches at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ontario. His op-ed in Monday’s Times, “The Tar Sands Disaster”, is appropriately titled. It might be one of the most banal pieces the paper has ever run on the subject.

Let’s start with the thesis, which appears to be the fact that a minority of Canadians (like him) don’t like Keystone XL, or the oilsands for that matter, despite the fact that resource extraction is pumping billions of dollars into an otherwise struggling economy. It must be nice to be a professor who can call for the shuttering of an industry that millions of Canadians rely upon to pay their mortgages.

The broader point, however, is so what? A lot of Canadians didn’t like free trade in the ‘80s, either. Quebec was iffy on the constitution. A lot of Canadians don’t like policies and businesses that are implemented for their own eventual benefit, and vice versa. Popularity contests may choose governments, but Nanos Research doesn’t get the final vote on public policy, quite rightly.

Apart from the fact he doesn’t like it, the author goes on to insist Alberta’s bitumen is “junk” because it takes more energy to produce than conventional oil. Again, so what? We wonder if he’s compared the resources required to produce the equivalent energy using solar or wind. If energy density is the only measure that matters, English simply doesn’t have a word to describe our current collection of clean alternatives.

It’s a bit rich of the author to then go on and refer to Canada as a “petro state” when only about 5% of its total GDP is derived from oil and gas extraction.

Equally galling, he equates resource extraction with low innovation. Whatever else you may think of them, the oilsands are a modern-day engineering marvel that required almost a century of research, development and high-risk capital investment.

For a professor of any repute to associate oilsands with low innovation is patently ignorant. It’s born of a notion that Maclean’s Colby Cosh eloquently defined as “Ebsenism”, the idea that Albertans just shot a deregistered rifle into the ground and found themselves awash in easy, morally compromised wealth. It’s as if there’s something more ethically distasteful about producing oil than in manufacturing the cars that consume it.

Mr. Homer-Dixon goes on to casually drop a Dutch Disease reference into his piece, even though reams of intelligent analysis published in recent months has so successfully demonstrated the implausibility of this theory that even NDP leader Thomas Mulcair has stopped trying to beat that goat. The list goes on, but the op-ed takes the cake when the professor essentially makes an appeal to president Barack Obama to reject Keystone XL on the grounds that continuing the development of the oilsands would continue the erosion of Canada’s democracy. Yes, let’s appeal to the head of a foreign country, a man who has no accountability to Canadians, to save Canadian democracy from the leaders Canadians elected. Moving right along.

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The Last Honest Politician

A memorial service has been scheduled for former Alberta premier Ralph Klein, who passed away on Friday. His family was offered, and declined, a state funeral. Instead, a public memorial will be held on Friday at the Jack Singer Concert Hall, just across the street from the city hall that consumed so much of his public life. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is expected to attend. In that light, it’s worthwhile to browse an online condolence book set up by the Alberta government.

Here was a politician who was respected for running on a platform, and sticking to it. Even those people who were affected by his late ‘90s cuts had to respect the integrity with which he performed them.

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